Boy, Interrupted
by horsecrazy2
Summary: Your world fractures. You are spit out in pieces. Seifer, post-Time Compression.


**A/N: For anyone reading this going why the fuck are you posting new stories instead of the next chapter to Now Comes the Witch, I promise I'll have a new chapter up within a couple of days. I've been working away on it, I just haven't had time to edit and post the next chapter in addition to actually writing the fic.**

**Also, I see people say that you should never use second person, blah, blah, blah- too many fucking rules, it's my writing and I'll do what I want with it. So this is my 'fuck it, this perspective does not get used nearly enough' middle finger to all those people. I hope you'll give it a try anyway, even if it's not exactly conventional. **

**Oh, and if it weren't already abundantly clear, Final Fantasy 8 is not mine, GODDAMMIT.**

You are spit out in pieces.

A fragment here, a splinter there: pastfuturepresent; all your memories are streaks of ruin in a blurred watercolor.

Your body is half-submerged in water that smells like old death: decomposition and seaweed and salt-

This is what your world reeks of now.

Your mind you leave behind in a neutral smoke-gray filmstrip that flick-flick-flicks behind your eyes: a shadowland that still has your mother and all her sniveling little orphans that were never supposed to amount to anything, not with you in their midst.

Time Compression.

This is what the filmstrip and the fragmentary collages of pastfuturepresent are called.

This is what you came through.

This is what ripped out your heart and burned its pieces and choked you on the fucking _ash_-

You are inside out or upside down and everything is spinning spinning spinning-

You sink into black, and everything is nothing or nothing is everything-

You can't remember which anymore.

* * *

><p><strong>Patient Identification: Seifer Almasy is an 18-year-old male here for hallucinations, auditory and visual, amnesia, violent mood swings.<strong>

**Reason For Treatment/Interim History: Pt. is a victim of the Sorceress Ultimecia, under her control for approximately seven months,** **and has been evaluated here in the past for violent outbursts and severe nightmares following his stint in D-district. The Tri-Garden Council has requested he be sequestered here until a thorough evaluation can be completed and he is deemed safe for release into society. **

**Mental Status Exam: Pt. presents appropriately dressed and groomed; he is uncooperative toward any questioning. Alert times three. Does not allude to any current hallucinations or issues.**

**Treatment Recommendations: We will increase the patient's Xylopram to 5 mg, and see if this helps to regulate his sleep patterns. **

**Comments: Pt. is quite belligerent, over all. He is a constant disruption here at the facility, bothering the other patients and heckling his nurses. He appears to be of sound mind, although his roommate complains of being woken up often by patient thrashing around and screaming in his sleep. Edea Kramer progressed similarly in her symptoms, so we will just continue to monitor him carefully for now.**

* * *

><p>Growing up, your mother always told you you were going to be the hero of the story. She filled your head with stories and your heart with lies, and you ate it up, <em>all <em>of it, like the dumbfuck you were and are and always will be.

In here, there are no stories or lies.

In here, you are the villain and they pick and pick and pick at the edges of your mind, trying to unfold and roll back and probe into all the layers and layers of rot that comprise your midnight fucking soul.

They don't understand that maybe the only thing that makes you tick is wanting to watch the world burn.

Once upon a time, your mother understood, and loved you anyway.

In here, your mother is dead.

Or, more correctly: she might as well be.

They think you do not see her shuffling along the hallways between patient doctors and kind-smiling nurses with their little white fucking hats and their steadying hands, propping your mother up by the arms because she moves like an old woman now, but you _do_, get it, you fucking see _everything_: your mother's unbrushed hair and shaking hands and the way she looks right past you like she doesn't even fucking know you-

The medication gloss that turns her eyes into flat blank glass and all the stares and the pointing and the whispering, all these crazies who can't stop goddamned gossiping about you, the craziest of them all-

You take it all in and you roll it around in your mouth, test out its texture, and it all tastes like old meat and blood and bleach-

It reminds you of Time Compression, of a dark room and a darker gnawing in the pit of your stomach-

But this is what everything reminds you of.

You prefer Time Compression to that room, if you want to know the truth.

* * *

><p><strong>Patient Identification: Seifer Almasy is an 18-year-old male here for ongoing problems with nightmares, auditory and visual hallucinations, and increasingly violent mood swings.<strong>

**Reason for Treatment/Interim History: See previous report.**

**Mental Status Exam: Pt. presents appropriately dressed and groomed, but only crosses his arms and glares at me when I try to ask him any questions. Alert times three. I receive no answer when I ask him if his nightmares or any of his other issues are improving.**

**Treatment Recommendations: For now, we are going to keep his Xylopram at 5 mg; I think his mental state right now is probably delicate enough that I don't want to play around with his medications too much. **

**Comments: Today pt. says nothing, but I interview his caregivers and roommate and they all report that he is becoming increasingly violent. His roommate complains quite vehemently to me that he is not getting any sleep due to patient, and would like to be moved to a different room. We will see about getting this done. **

* * *

><p>Your mind smudges. It's like a fucking eraser, scrubbing everything out; swipe swipe swipe, there goes that memory and the one next to it- remember that time you crouched at your mother's feet like a dog, killing and killing and killing for her; well not anymore, gone like your life's a fucking keyboard and you've got the delete key to the fucking metal.<p>

You don't mind.

Your memories are all raw and red and dripping around the edges, and you don't want to keep most of them anyway.

Just leave the ones with the girl and the beach and the sandcastles, melting away into the rising tide.

You'd like to do the same, lay there in that incoming surf until all your bones soften and peel away, until you're nothing more than a stain in the fucking sand.

At night when you are supposed to be sleeping, you pretend the ceiling is the sky and you're a fucking bird, and it's all limitless possibility going on forever underneath your wings.

* * *

><p><strong>Patient Identification: Seifer Almasy is an 18-year-old male here for evaluation of auditory and visual hallucinations, amnesia, violent mood swings, and insomnia.<strong>

**Reason for Treatment/Interim History: See previous report.**

**Mental Status Exam: Pt. is not physically present today; I am interviewing his caregiver.**

**Treatment Recommendations: Hold all meds for the moment. Xylopram does not seem to be helping; pt. may possibly be having a bad reaction to it.**

**Comments: Caregiver reports that Seifer is sleeping less and less, waking more frequently in the middle of the night. He is disoriented when he wakes, and has attempted to attack the caregiver as well as his roommate on more than one occasion, until he recalls where he is. Today he attempted an escape, and is being treated for minor injuries sustained during the incident. His roommate has been assigned a different room. **

* * *

><p>Your old instructor is the only one who comes to see you.<p>

You spot her at the reception desk in your downtime between shrinks, and you stand and just watch and watch and watch, as long as you can manage, as long as she keeps leaning up against that desk with her skirt riding up her thigh and her voice going colder and tighter and harder, and you're so fucking glad, you know?

All you were ever trying to do in her stupid fucking class was make sure she didn't forget you.

Her glasses wink sunspots of ugly fluorescent back at you, like some kind of signal.

You pretend it's a sign, a secret just between the two of you, but most of all you pretend it means she's here to take you home; you pretend these bare feet underneath you with the banged-up toes and the uncut nails and the constellation scattering of scars are going to touch cold rain-shining pavement in just a moment, a second, an eye blink-

She is done arguing with the receptionist, and turns away in disgust.

You are caught.

She cannot look away from your too-long hair and your beard-scuffed chin and the half-moons of bruise beneath your eyes.

Once upon a time there was a boy with grandiose fucking dreams, you think.

Once upon a time there was a little girl with blue eyes and a smile.

She is gone now. A woman with cold-winter eyes and a backbone laser-cut from steel came and took her away.

The boy is not simply gone, but dead and buried and pissed on by the survivors of all those he has broken and murdered and fucked over.

Once upon a time is gone.

Happily ever after is gone.

There are no more stories in here, remember?

* * *

><p><strong>Patient Identification: Seifer Almasy is an 18-year-old male here for hallucinations both auditory and visual, violent mood swings, amnesia and insomnia. <strong>

**Reason for Treatment/Interim History: See previous report.**

**Mental Status Exam: Pt. presents appropriately groomed and dressed. Caregiver is present as well. Pt. is alert but again not responsive to my questions. **

**Treatment Recommendations: Continue to hold meds for now. **

**Comments: Caregiver reports pt. punched a staff member in the nose yesterday while being evaluated. This was apparently prompted by questions about his childhood. Caregiver was forced to restrain him and had to call for security when pt. threw him off. Three guards sustained injuries in the process. I will consider keeping him sedated, although I do not want to do this, as I think it will hinder any progress he might make. We will monitor closely for now.**

* * *

><p>You remember what freedom looks like.<p>

Blue sky and yellow beach and gulls in the clouds and a wooden sword in your hand, getting dragged along behind you in the sand-

It tastes like salt.

It smells of rain and trees and your mother's garden.

It feels like a little girl's book, getting wrenched away and tossed down and stomped all over, because she is not paying attention to you; splinters in your palm and tide-damp sand in your hand and washed-up sea creatures underneath your running running running feet-

In here, you taste chlorinated water and cancer-gray gel that is supposed to be lunch, and blood in your throat and between your teeth and all over your lips.

It smells of medication and decay and people who don't give a shit about hygiene.

It feels like crisp-ironed bed sheets under your fingers, and the clink clink clink of the metal-gleaming tags they let you keep, sliding across your palm.

In here, the walls are like Time Compression: gray and featureless and spotted in shadow.

You talk to them because there will never be anything or anyone that listens so quietly or thoroughly or without judgment, and behind the panel on your door they watch and shake their stupid fucking heads and make notes about how much more bat-shit you're getting by the day/hour/minute.

It's this place that's doing it, and the sight of your mother walking its halls like she is a robot.

What are you dreaming about? This is what they all want to know.

You're dreaming about the scalpel they took to your mother's brain when they couldn't cure her, and the one that's coming for yours.

* * *

><p><strong>Patient Identification: Seifer Almasy is an 18-year-old male here for hallucinations both auditory and visual, violent mood swings, amnesia and insomnia. <strong>

**Reason for Treatment/Interim History: See previous report.**

**Mental Status Exam: Again, pt. presents appropriately groomed and dressed. Caregiver is present today as well. Pt. is alert but yet again not responsive to my questions. **

**Treatment Recommendations: Continue to hold meds for now. **

**Comments: Pt., predictably, is still not talking. Caregiver reports he continues to talk to himself while he is in his room, and will not interact with the other patients. Pt. always sits alone while eating in the cafeteria, and continues to be unresponsive to all treatment. Caregiver reports that he brought Seifer to see Edea Kramer yesterday afternoon, and pt. became visibly upset and tried to throw a chair through the window in her room. All other evaluators continue to get nowhere with him. A former instructor from Balamb Garden has requested to see him three times now, and I think maybe we will allow a short visit, to see if this will perhaps make him a little more cooperative.**

* * *

><p>She sits across from you with both hands in her lap and those glasses perfectly balanced on her nose.<p>

You think about how nice she smells, like something tropical- coconuts and breezes and beaches that fold into sun-scorched dunes.

She wants you to talk to her.

You forgot to tell her why you were always such a pain in the fucking ass during all her lectures: this is what you think about saying.

It did not and does not and will never matter.

She has always chosen Squall Leonhart.

Your old smirk trembles on the corners of your lips and cannot quite make it, and across the table between you she stretches out a hand like she's reaching for one of yours, and inside your chest your pulse becomes a fucking jackhammer: chip chip chip, there go all the walls around your heart-

And then her hand coils up and pulls back and she shifts in her seat and clears her throat and pokes those meticulously polished glasses back into place-

You have been glued back together all wrong; pride is your only adhesive now.

You keep your hands folded on that table between you like there is no electric itch going up and down your whole body, telling you to reach out and take her hand if she's not going to do it for you.

It's just fucking lonely in here, is all.

You don't want to talk at all- you want her to do it for you, because your voice is this terminal patient rasp that hangs up in your throat, and you're goddamned sick of listening to it.

"Remember before you made SeeD, when we used to practice in the Training Center sometimes?" is what you want to ask her, but do not.

Remember when I kissed you and you pretended not to like it- remember how you left me behind and forgot me and took a shit all over my _heart_, panting after Puberty Boy like that-

Remember a little girl on a beach who didn't have a body count?

You do, Instructor. You didn't let go of her.

You drape your arms across the chair behind you and hitch one ankle up onto your knee, and you smirk and smirk and smirk, like she can't see right through it.

At night, you cry yourself to sleep when no one is watching or listening or judging.

You imagine being a fucking bird, for Hyne's sake, spiraling away on updrafts that carry you farther and farther out from this horrible goddamned place where your mother is an arthritically shuffling corpse and they want to fix your brain by cutting it all to shit.

You pretend you never left Time Compression: all of this around you, white-painted angles of walls layered in feel-good propaganda and the scar tissue of old food- it's all just one more splinter you're floating through, a pastfuturepresent you're going to step out of like a magician slipping the rope, and one day you're going to wake up for real.

One day, you will not be here anymore.

All of these are truths you know she has never even considered before, because you're a fucking mask, and she has never bothered to see past you.

* * *

><p><strong>Patient Identification: Seifer Almasy is an 18-year-old male here for hallucinations both auditory and visual, violent mood swings, amnesia and insomnia. <strong>

**Reason for Treatment/Interim History: See previous report.**

**Mental Status Exam: Caregiver is present in patient's place today. **

**Treatment Recommendations: Patient will be sedated until further notice. **

**Comments: Pt. suffered an attack yesterday and vandalized his room. The charge nurse heard loud noises coming from patient's room and went to check on him; she found him screaming and slamming his shoulder into the bars on his window. When security attempted to subdue him, pt. turned his bed over and tried to attack all four of them; he had to be held down by six staff members long enough to administer sedatives. We are going to keep him sedated for now.**

* * *

><p>The shit in here is no match for your nightmares.<p>

It is just enough to haze everything, and take nothing away.

You remember the day they fixed your mother.

The sun is a slowly creeping bloodstain through the far window. Your pants puddle out around your feet like a kid playing dress-up, and beside your thighs your hands become pale winter-chilled fists.

They wheel her down a hall- _the _hall- with her toes poking up from underneath a sheet and her hands swinging limply down both sides of her stretcher-

And something inside of you goes nuclear.

You have seen this final death march before.

They are _taking her away from you_- everything that makes her Matron, everything that is still somewhere inside of her, all folded up until she is ready to forgive herself-

The walls and the floor and the faces all around you are a blur, smudges of color and light and voices you don't give a shit about-

She is your _mother _and she is in there somewhere scared and hurting and _don't take her away she is all you have left_-

You are slammed into a wall, and another and another and another, and all of your training and your blood lust rear their ugly fucking heads and now you are smashing smashing _smashing _and you cannot get enough because if you do not get to her in time you are going to be all alone-

No one else _loves _you, don't they _understand_?

You tear and you hit and you dodge, but there are too many, there are _always _too many-

And your world fractures.

When you wake up, she is an automaton.

Her smile, when she looks your way at all, is vague and empty and brittle, and it hurts.

It hurts more than anything has ever hurt.

* * *

><p>You think about the girl with blue eyes and no body count and the boy who was going to grow up and save people, and you spiral in and out of sleep.<p>

You pretend this slurry medicinal haze is a fever getting soothed away by your mother's hand and voice, and you count the tiles in the ceiling and the cracks in your voice, and around your sweat-soaked bed they scribble notes and adjust glasses and make pitying little noises in the backs of their throats.

You drift in and out of that room with the monster who used to be a mother.

She smiles at you from her mirror, but it is all teeth and you are scared, you are fucking _terrified_, but what the goddamned hell are you supposed to do now- you can't just leave her to get picked away at by this thing that is slowly consuming her, piece by piece by piece-

* * *

><p>You are spiraling.<p>

You slip free of the drugs and are hurled back into them: you sink down and down and down into them like layers of feathers, cushioning you all the way to the bottom-

You hear them talking about Quistis, asking for you at the front desk.

You smile.

You shift your wrists and flex your feet and tell them to let you go- there is going to be a hell of a fucking situation on their hands if they ignore Garden-

Her voice is somewhere out in the hallway beyond your room.

You cannot stop smiling.

You slip under.

* * *

><p>You claw your way back up.<p>

Your world is the _scritch scritch scritch _of pens going going going, and a commotion in the hallway that is an entire fucking patient uprising, or your old instructor back again.

You pretend it is the latter.

Maybe she remembers the boy and the girl and the sandcastles, and she wants to make sure he is not gone.

He is gone. He is dead and buried and pissed on, remember?

But you are still here, if she wants you.

You slip under.

* * *

><p>You remember the secret area and her fingers finding your hair and your tongue in her mouth and the way you both have to lean into one another, to keep from falling-<p>

You think _holy shit I'm in love with the bossy little bitch who used to stop me from beating up Wuss _and you hold her close close closer-

And you stumble through gray-layered fog that is eating up all your memories, and it is trying to take the one about her lips and her fingers and her hips, pressed into yours even though she doesn't know what to do with them-

You slip under.

* * *

><p>"Seifer!"<p>

She's never said your name this way before, all hard, sharp angles whittled down by fear.

You tongue the blood from your throat and shake the smog from your brain and you try to say something, anything, even a little insignificant fucking _croak_-

-but there is nothing and her voice is fading away and there's this howling in your fucking ears that you think might be the ocean and you blink the crust from your eyes and strain up with your body until all your joints pop like rivets coming loose-

And you think about your mother drooling into her soup and painting stick figures into gravy she smears messily across the table in front of her and you pull pull _pull_- you are fucking getting _out _of here-

You slip under.

* * *

><p>There is a sheet over your body.<p>

You dangle parts of you out from underneath it: toes and fingers and the crown of your head, lolling back against a pillow you think might have been the same one they slipped underneath your mother.

You can smell her.

Or you think you can smell her.

Maybe you are just remembering houses with children and mothers and patiently-smiling fathers, piggybacking sons across their shoulders.

You hear the boot-clop of feet running toward you, but maybe you are imagining this too.

"Wait. _Wait_-"

You hear arguments about rehabilitation and lost causes, and the slow downward spiral of your mother, preceding you into madness.

You blink.

Blonde hair and blue eyes and fluorescent-glinting glasses resolve into one solid form trailing down the hallway after your toes, and you hack the boulder from your throat and hiss her name-

And she stops.

The wheels underneath your stretcher squeal like knives against the floor.

Your hand flops like a fish finding dry bed underneath an upstream leap.

"Wait," she says again, and she cannot look away from you.

Nothing waits, you will tell her one day.

You learned this in Time Compression, and even earlier, when she graduated to SeeD at the unheard of age of fifteen and left you alone and behind and broken-hearted.

The lights hurt your eyes.

The stretcher hurts your back.

Her eyes and the compression of her lips hurt your chest.

You blink again.

Her face dips out of focus and coils back together, puzzle pieces slotting into one another.

There is a hand on your shoulder and a gentle voice in your ear, telling you to count down from one hundred.

You say nothing.

You want to go on hearing her voice for as long as you can, as long as she keeps pounding on the door like she thinks they're going to fucking let her in and screaming something that matches all the syllables in your name but cannot actually _be _your name, because that is not what it sounds like.

Not coming from her.

The lights hurt your eyes, and then suddenly they do not, then suddenly they are eclipsed by something dark and shifting and warm as the fucking sun beating down on your shoulders-

You slip under.

* * *

><p><strong>Patient Identification: Seifer Almasy is an 18-year-old male here for hallucinations both auditory and visual, violent mood swings, amnesia and insomnia. <strong>

**Reason for Treatment/Interim History: See previous report.**

**Mental Status Exam: Caregiver is present in patient's place today. **

**Treatment Recommendations: Full-scale lobotomy. **

**Comments: We have adjusted patient's meds and sedatives for more than a month now, and pt. is not responding. Seifer is experiencing the same sorts of hallucinations Edea Kramer complained about before her operation, and has been on a similar downward spiral since his first day here. We're finding it necessary to keep ramping up the dosage on his sedatives, similar to what we went through with Edea Kramer just a few months ago. Pt. Edea Kramer of course has her own file, but to briefly sum up my concerns, she eventually snapped out of enough sedatives to keep a man three times her size unconscious for days, and killed three patients and two staff members. I'm afraid I feel surgery is the only option for Seifer, for the safety of the staff and the other patients here. **

**The Tri-Garden Council has been notified; they have given us their consent to proceed. Pt. will be monitored post-surgery to ensure the surgery was successful, and then we will move him over to the permanent resident ward with Edea Kramer. **


End file.
